10. Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room
The story of the corporate crime of the century - and the defining one of the digital era - Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room sees director Alex Gibney's first of two entries on this list. Focusing on the infamous collapse of energy company Enron, which went from a billion dollar corporation to bankrupt in some 24 days (though obviously it is nowhere near as straightforward as that), Gibney collates a wealth of material - talking-heads, company footage, stock-footage - to present the downfall of a company which was ultimately the victim of it's own hubris. This really is a Greek tragedy. While ostensibly a political story, the Enron narrative ends up as something closer to a crime, with people like the deplorable former CEO and President of Enron, Jeff Skillet, and CFO, Andrew Fastow, coming across as film-style monsters, stealing from the poor to give to the rich. A little too on the nose with some of it's metaphor-making stock footage, Enron is otherwise a tempered, studied affair, one which breaks the downfall down into digestible chunks of information which highlight exactly how cunning Enron were (or at least thought they were) in their deceptions. A disaster which caused incalculable loss, Gibney's film (and the book of the same name which it is based on) is a quintessential part of a saga too often overlooked in the history of America's great controversies.